It is common knowledge that all meat products undergo a substantial weight loss during cooking. This weight loss occurs due to the cooking out of the natural meat juices during the cooking process further resulting in a substantial shrinkage of the cooked meat product.
For example, an untreated beef roast will loose between 25% and 30% of its pre-cooked weight through cooking. This weight loss represents a significant loss in revenue to the producers of pre-cooked meet products, and such a loss of revenue is ultimately passed down to the consumer in terms of higher meat prices.
In an attempt to minimize revenue losses, it has become a standard practice throughout the meat industry to inject uncooked meat with various brine solutions, such as aqueous solutions of sodium chloride and one or more phosphate salts, in order to partially inhibit as well as to compensate for excessive moisture loss incurred during cooking.
As a typical example, a beef roast having a pre-cooked weight of 10 pounds is injected with 1 pound of a brine solution comprising 0.825 pounds of water, 0.125 pounds of sodium chloride and 0.050 pounds sodium tripolyphosphate and subsequently cooked. After cooking, the product weight was about 10 pounds indicating a moisture loss of approximately 10%.
Thus, it may be seen that pre-treatment of the meat with the brine solution significantly reduced the amount of cooked out juices as compared with the example for untreated meat wherein a weight loss of about 25 to 30% resulted. To date, it has been impossible to achieve a controlled moisture loss of less than about 10%.